10/26/2018

George Will on Hate Crimes and Federal PowersMichael Ramsey

After showing off his swastika tattoo, Randy Metcalf became involved in a barroom brawl. One of his opponents was an African American, whom he and his friends knocked unconscious. Metcalf repeatedly kicked him in the head and, according to a witness, said, “Die, [n-word], die.” Metcalf was sentenced to 10 years in prison under the federal Hate Crimes Prevention Act that was enacted six years earlier, in 2009.

Soon, perhaps at its conference this Friday, the Supreme Court will decide whether to hear Metcalf’s argument that the provision of the HCPA that he was convicted under is unconstitutional because none of the Constitution’s enumerated powers authorized Congress to enact it. The court should hear and endorse this argument, lest the nation’s dangerously attenuated commitment to limited government become even more so.

On the constitutional point:

Congress, always eager to slip what little remains of the Constitution’s leash that limits Congress’s powers by enumerating them, frequently justifies doing whatever it wants by saying that the behavior it wants to proscribe or prescribe affects interstate commerce and therefore comes under Congress’s enumerated power to regulate this. But although the commerce clause has been construed to be so elastic that it is almost entirely permissive, Congress, perhaps manifesting a vestigial capacity for embarrassment, looked elsewhere for the power to prohibit racially motivated crimes.

“Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

“Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

To justify enacting the HCPA, Congress cited the power granted to it 144 years earlier to effectuate the end of slavery, which shows no sign of returning. Congress, surely with more audacity than sincerity, said that the 13th Amendment, written to erase slavery, authorizes Congress to pursue any goal that it asserts is in some way, however attenuated, a response to a “relic” or “incidents” or lingering reverberation of slavery.

This, says an amicus brief on Metcalf’s behalf, reflects “a growing movement in both academia and Congress to use the 13th Amendment to address a variety of social ills thought to be in some way traceable to, or aggravated by, slavery.” Yet the amendment’s legal significance is unusually clear and limited: It bans slavery, period. So, in 1883, the Supreme Court held that the amendment did not empower Congress to prohibit race discrimination in public accommodations. Congress did that 81 years later, properly acting under the commerce clause. If now the court allows Congress to construe — to flagrantly misconstrue, to its advantage — a notably unambiguous constitutional provision, the damage done by this misguided judicial deference will go beyond injuries to federalism. This dereliction of judicial duty will devalue the written Constitution itself.

The amicus brief mentioned in the article is by Peter Kirsanow and my colleague Gail Heriot, available here. Prior Originalism Blog coverage of the case is here.

(Via Gail Heriot at Instapundit, who adds: " In a nutshell: Congress claims to be using its power to outlaw slavery in prohibiting hate crimes. And … well … hate crimes are bad things, but they aren’t slavery.").